Art of Mindfulness
From Bullet to Blanket: Beginning of My Journey of Mindfulness
Mindfulness helped my kid dodge a dangerous bullet. I was the bullet. Being aware of it helped me in transforming myself from a psychological bullet into a soft, safe, warm, protective, loving and nurturing blanket.
Instead of hurting my kid, I became the source of her comfort and healing. I became her strength. It could not have been possible without mindfulness.
Everything Was Not Ok: A Mother’s Discovery
It all started a few years back when I noticed my kid tearing away at buttons on her uniform during the ride to school. She would have this miserable look and stare furiously at me and her father or stare at the scenes passing by the car window, always tense and wound up.
She looked miserable and she felt miserable. And those were the good days. On bad days, she would throw up her breakfast and cry all the way to the school. She would sob uncontrollably and beg us to take her back to home.
She had always been like this. Going to school was an ordeal for her. Me and my husband always thought of this behaviour as her dislike for school and studies. Our excuse always used to be that since we never liked school, she is proving to be our daughter. So it’s ok. We were so wrong. Nothing was ok. It was far from ok.
Signs of Anguish: My Mistakes in Managing My Daughter’s Anxiety
As I said, it started when I began to notice her trying to tear out her school uniform buttons. Uptil now, I had congratulated myself on having to successfully managed whatever issues she had about going to school by turning her crying and sobbing into a subdued acceptance.
If she had stopped crying, if she is now quite during her morning rides to school, that’s an achievement feather in my motherhood cap, right? That’s when I started to notice these small things in her behaviour. Trying to tear off buttons was the first. Then there was poking her fingers into the cushions so forcefully that her tiny nails would tear the fabric.
The foamy part of the dashboard in our car had a permanent hole where she had scrapped away the covering by constant scratching and poking with her nails while sitting in my lap during her early morning ride to her school, jabbing at it in her angry silence.
A Mother’s Discovery: Seeking Answers
That simmering silence of hers used to unnerve me. I was beginning to realise that something was not right. I may have succeeded in making her stop crying and complaining constantly and her more severe episodes of nausea and throwing up have mitigated considerably but my kid was not ok, I needed to find some answers.
This is when I discovered mindfulness. It was during my desperate attempts to understand my kid’s anxiety issues concerning her school when I stumbled upon this term called mindfulness. This changed my life. And my daughter’s.
Returning to the Body: Being Present in the Moment
In simplest words, mindfulness means to be present in the moment. Mindfulness means living in the moment, to experience the present moment, as it is, without effort to change it or to judge it or to categorise it or to try to fit it into a box. To be mindful is simply, to be.
Take a moment to think about how we are spending our lives? Most of the time, majority of us, are on autopilot. We are getting by. Just that. We try to make ends meet and somehow manage it. Try to survive and somehow make it happen. We put up a good show and look alright from outside.
Some of us even manage to look great while pretending to be ok. But between all this, there are moments of desperation when we feel that everything is crumbling down. These moments we keep to ourselves. We are in a mess and we know it but we hide it beautifully.
Deep within our true selves, we know there is a better way to live, a better way to experience life, to have a meaningful purpose. Deep down inside we know that there is more to life than just pretending to be ok, pretending to be happy. We know that there is a better way to live but we don’t know how.
Poster Child of Autopilot Living: Fighting Stress With Addictions
This was me before I discovered mindfulness and started practicing it. I was the poster child of living on autopilot. Pretending to be ok to the world and doing an amazing job of it.
Inside, I was a mess and without realising it, pilling this mess up on my child, burying her deeper and deeper into emotional despair and anxiety which I refused to face or accept.
I had multiple means of numbing myself into believing that I was living ‘the life’ and loving it. By means of numbing I mean my addictions. There were many, my social media not the least of it.
On an average, we think 60,000 thoughts in a day. We spent 50 percent of our awake state in thinking thoughts. Take a moment to think about what these thoughts are?
They are mostly either worries about the future or regrets and resentments about the past. We keep thinking about the things which happened to us in the past or imagine scenarios, mostly negative, about the future.
This negative thought pattern results in stress, anxiety, depression and many other negative traits which in turn hurt our physical bodies in form of diabetes or hypertension or cardiovascular problems or autoimmune disorders.
Alarming rise in the number of people suffering from these disorders has now reached epidemic levels with one in every three people (that’s a third of the population) suffering and the number one cause of all this is, stress.
Coping Mechanisms: The Addiction Spiral
To keep ourselves distracted from the reality of our lives, more importantly, the reality within ourselves which we repress deep in our unconsciousness, we develop coping mechanisms, mostly in forms of different addictions.
It can be substance abuse, it can be food, it can be TV or gaming or partying or shopping or porn or gambling or work or even relationships. Addiction is identified any behaviour pattern which makes us feel good for a short time but hurts our mental and physical health in the long term.
In our time, the prevailing addiction is social media, hours upon hours spend in endless scrolling, swiping, clicking. All this serves one purpose. To numb ourselves so we won’t feel our ‘real’ self.
This is exactly the life I was living. Trying to numb away deeply buried pain. Numbing myself so I wouldn’t feel the despairing anxiety which would make itself felt from time to time, from the depths of my unconscious self, where I had kept it buried, deep inside me.
Problem is, that pain doesn’t disappear if we refuse to accept that it is there. It remains there, buried inside, hurting us. Comes out in forms which are hurtful to us and our loved ones.
It finds cracks in our personalities and bursts out in shape of anger, rage, depression, anxiety disorders, self blame, toxic hate, toxic shame and self-harm, both emotional and physical.
Power of Breath: Healing Myself One Inhale At A Time
So how does mindfulness work and why is it the best thing since sliced bread?
Mindfulness works by bringing our scattered focus back to our bodies where the all the pain and trauma gets stored over time. We do it by becoming aware of our breathing. That’s it. Yes! This is it.
Try it right now if you don’t believe it. Take a breath in. Just be aware of doing it. Put your phone down and sit up comfortably. Close your eyes. Or don’t. It’s ok either way. Now take a breath, naturally.
Doesn’t have to be a deep breath but take a deep breath if you want to. Just focus on it. Take a breath in. Breath out.
Be aware of your breath going in, down in your lungs. Feel how your chest responds. Feel how your belly responds. You will experience the change instantly. Your mind will become aware of your surroundings and your own body.
This is mindfulness. You don’t need to sit in a certain way or make a posture or anything else. In the beginning, you just breathe and learn to keep your focus on your breathing.
That’s it. Do it lying down or standing still or sitting in the lotus position or walking along the street. Do it for one minute or do it for 10, mindfulness will always help you in being where you need to be; in the moment.
Focusing on breathing is the best way to settle your mind. Breath is readily available. It is always there. You don’t have to look for it. It’s always there, in your lungs, flowing in and out through your nostrils.
Your breath is not involved in any emotions, any reasoning, or making choices. Your breath will never pass any judgements. It will simply, move in, move out. Just focus on it.
Start by keeping your focus on three simple steps. Inhaling the breath. Keeping it in for a second or two. Exhaling the breath. Welcome to mindfulness. Your life will never be the same again.
Essence of Mindfulness: Returning Awareness To The Body
Mindfulness is simple. Each step towards a more advanced practice is basically a more disciplined method of the same basic idea. Bring the scattered and battered mind back to the body. Bring your attention in the moment.
Be present, in this moment, right here, right now. Help your mind to break free from constant stress by letting it come to rest where it belongs: within your body. The mind wants to wander.
For far too long, the mind has been addicted to unhealthy patterns. Help the mind, gently and kindly, by guiding it back in the present by focusing on breathing. This is mindfulness.
One of the biggest misconceptions about mindfulness is that it involves emptying your mind of all thoughts. In its essence, mindfulness is about being AWARE of your experiences as you are experiencing them.
Equally importantly, to suspend any judgement about these experiences which include sensations, thoughts, and feelings. Mindfulness is about acknowledging and accepting whatever is there, without judgement.
Healing Through Mindfulness: The Transformative Power of Focus
Worrying about the future causes anxiety. Thinking about the past causes depression. By bringing the focus back to the body, back to the present, by keeping your focus on your breathing,
you gradually train your brain to deny it’s psychic energy to tasks which are useless and harmful (worrying and overthinking) and then use all this energy in tasks which are beneficial and healthy (creativity and healing).
Bringing the focus back to the body is the beginning of a life changing experience. Mindfulness opens up the door to self awareness and self healing by letting us free our physical selves from pain and suffering which is the result of unresolved traumas. Emotional pain always gets trapped in the body.
Mindfulness helps us in becoming aware of all that which gets buried deep inside by bringing the focus back to our bodies. Mindfulness teaches to be aware without judgement, without shame and without hate.
It helps us in accepting that we feel all these things and that we can do so without blaming ourselves. It also teaches us to accept responsibility with the awareness that it is not our fault.
Mindfulness: Passing On Selfawareness
It has helped me in realising things which I have been blind to most of my life. It has helped me understand how I adopted certain coping mechanisms and thought of them as my personality.
I justified my behaviour as being who I am, never realising that it’s just defence mechanism put in place by my unconscious self because my conscious self could not face the reality of my life.
Without mindfulness, it would have never been possible for me to have enough courage to look for source of my own anxieties.
It has helped me to look inside my own self, to explore my own repressed traumas and to slowly and gradually accept them and come to terms with them. It has helped me in dealing with hate and shame and vulnerability.
More than anything, it has helped me to recognize, just in time, the damage which I unknowingly was inflicting on my own child. For the first time in her young life, I realized that my kid doesn’t hate school, she has severe separation anxiety.
I also realized, and more importantly, accepted that I was the source of her separation anxiety. Been a psychological bullet speeding towards my kid. I could have caused unthinkable damage. Instead, I became my kid’s source of love and energy. I became her best friend. I became her favourite security blanket.
Acceptance And Responsibility: Bonds of Love
Fact is that I wasn’t the only source of my kid’s anxiety issues. My husband too, had played his part. But one of the things which comes with mindfulness is that you stop the blame game.
Why did things happen to me which made me the person I am? Why this, why that? Should I blame myself or blame my parents? Should I blame fate or some higher power?
This attitude can paralyze you into toxic overthinking or push you into behaviour which is just coping mechanism. Mindfulness makes you break free from overthinking.
We have enormous energies in ourselves. We mostly use it for worrying about the future or feeling sorry or angry or resentful about the past. Mindfulness has helped me to stop wasting that precious energy and bring it back to my body, back to the present where I can utilise it for creativity and healing.
Clarity of a Calm Mind: Cleaning Up the Mind’s Muddy Waters
There is an old wisdom saying. If you have a glass full of muddy water, you can’t see through it. If you put the glass down for a while, the dirt would settle down and it would be possible to see through the glass now.
Imagine that your mind is the glass full of water and the your worries and anxieties are the mud. Mindfulness is that time when you put the glass down and let the water be clear.
When the mind is calm, it’s easier to see things clearly. It’s possible to be compassionate to yourself, to forgive yourself & possible to heal.
Mindfulness is not just a practice. It’s a lifestyle.
